Ukrainian politics are undoubtedly some of the most complex, fractious, and fascinating in Europe. This fact became universally known in January, when Kyiv’s quotidian political maneuverings took center stage during President Trump’s impeachment trial. American audiences were exposed to the country’s campaign against endemic corruption, its oligarchic capture, and its weak governance (all of which is exaggerated by Kyiv’s ruthless adversary in the Kremlin). Certainly, Ukraine’s political elites are second to none in their flamboyance. The country is currently governed by Volodymyr Zelensky, an actor and comedian who became the real president of Ukraine after convincingly playing the president of Ukraine on TV.
Yet unlike the Russians, who spent the chaotic 1990s generating novels and satirical literary movements at a remarkable pace, post-independence Ukrainians never quite forged their own political literary tradition. Canonical contemporary Ukrainian writers Yurii Andrukhovych, Serhiy Zhadan, and Andrey Kurkov often deal with social matters, but in an oblique, roundabout fashion. (Oksana Zabuzhko’s multigenerational The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, published in 2009, constitutes the rare exception.) This is not for want of material: The nation’s politics constitute a surreal and never-ending drama. Curiously, however, the role of novelizing recent Ukrainian political history, of processing and interpreting it for a global literary audience, has fallen to outsiders.
The journalist A.D. Miller is a veteran hand in covering the post-Soviet world, experience from which he has liberally drawn in his novels. He reworked his journalistic experiences in Russia, where he served as the Moscow bureau chief for the Economist, into his previous political thriller, Snowdrops, which was nominated for the Booker Prize. Later, Miller covered the 2004 Orange Revolution in Kyiv, which he used as the basis for his latest novel, Independence Square. The square of the book’s title is Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, where Ukrainians routinely gather to protest and occasionally to bring down their government.
The plot of Independence Square centers on the brief and ultimately destructive romance between Simon Davey, the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Kyiv, and Olesya, a young and glamorously idealistic Ukrainian activist. Their relationship blooms against the backdrop of the 2004 revolution, when Ukrainians turned out en masse to protest the illegitimate election of Viktor Yanukovych. (Though the novel mostly leaves oligarchs and politicians unnamed, those familiar with Ukrainian politics will be able to deduce their identities.) Olesya is quickly swept up into the events that follow.
The novel transcribes in minute detail the course of the 2004 revolution: the rigged vote, the mass protests, the mandated recount, the standoff in the streets of Kyiv between massed representatives of two divergent visions of Ukraine’s future, and the poisoning of the main opposition candidate. The city is overtaken by chaos and the wartime rumor mill. “Rumor,” Miller writes, “was its queen. She had grown grander in her prophecies and scope. No longer predicting drunken miners, busloads of Titushky (thugs for hire), or released convicts, rumor was anticipating war. War with Russia, civil wars, coups, sabotage, states of emergency. Already, rumor maintained Russian spetsnaz (special forces) had been secreted in position, ready to open fire if the order came from Moscow.”
The romance and revolutionary carnage take place amid an evocatively (if sparely) described Kyiv, borne along in a lapidary tone. Chapters alternate vantage points between the events of the 2004 revolution and London 12 years later. The plot pivots around the moment when Kyiv’s Moscow-aligned government is on the cusp of ordering troops to open fire on the protesters.
Simon becomes romantically ensnared with Olesya and is compromised by the calculating oligarch Korvin. A loquacious TV baron, Korvin is a ruthless and amoral political operator who takes pleasure in delivering devilish monologues. “You know this old … not joke … proverb: my friends are near, but my belly is nearer. No? So my businesses are nearer than these big dramas. From my point of view, when this election story is finished, there must be rules of the game for business — who gets, who keeps.” Korvin is a convincing composite of the oligarchs who control Ukraine’s politics and whom any journalist covering the country will have encountered.
In the square and later again in his home, Korvin lectures Simon in dialectical fashion on the laws of history and the way that business is done in post-Soviet Ukraine. (“We are not angels, okay? Not absolutely clean. I am not a Hollywood hero, this is a fact.”) Angling for his ambassadorship and also wanting to do what he thinks is right, Simon disregards diplomatic protocol and personally intervenes in order to avert the imminent showdown between the revolutionaries and representatives of the pro-Russian portion of the political class.
His brave and sentimental actions are intended to secure a peaceful political transition, but he walks into a trap laid for him by the clever Korvin. Coupled with his affair with Olesya, this leads to the unraveling of Simon’s personal life and his ouster from the diplomatic service. Back in the present, we meet the disgraced Simon as he is driving an Uber to make ends meet while ruminating on the past. One day, he catches sight of Olesya on London’s Tube and takes after her in obsessive pursuit. The book shifts from a political fable to a slowly simmering detective story as Simon desperately tries to figure out why his life and history turned out the way that they did.
Though written by an Englishman, Independence Square is a worthy addition to the genre of Ukrainian political novels. One hopes it is only the first of many to come.
Vladislav Davidzon is the chief editor of the Odessa Review and a columnist at Tablet.
